I've kinda come to terms with buying eBooks instead of physical books, even though there are a lot of archivist implications involved that bug me. However, I still heavily dislike the use of DRM, so I want to avoid this as much as possible. And this turns out to be tricky...

When I was working at Yahoo!, Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo!. And I generally thought of it as a bad idea. At the time, my feelings were that if the deal went through, it would almost certainly mean the end of both companies... and I wasn't too interested in working for Microsoft.

A good example of somebody who approaches the level of worst enemy would be something akin to Robert Schiro, who already has his license suspended, hit a cyclist with his BMW, leaving her crippled for life, then drove off and tried to hide the evidence. And then, while he was waiting for sentencing, got caught again for reckless driving. He also, by the way, complained that he doesn''t live near any grocery stores as an attempt to justify why he should be allowed to continue to drive after all these driving incidents...

One time, Kiki and I were talking about neon tubes and the usual standard of using a piece of paper to judge if the tubing had reached the annealing temperature. And both of us recited 451 degrees Fahrenheit as the ignition temperature of paper, at which point Christian pointed out that it''s not an exact number as it depends on the paper, which is why you also want to use a thermocouple to make sure that the right temperature has been reached and that you generally want to anneal at more like 700 degrees or so...